Previews

Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty

In order to access our first turbine, we had to crack an environmental puzzle. It was a good excuse to test out the new wrench mechanics. Several gates separated Ratchet from the turbine, all of which were susceptible to fire. The first gate could be reached by traversing three floating platforms, but all of them were spread far out, and the lava rock that could burn the gate had a time limit. By using the tether function on the wrench, we pulled all three of them parallel, then grabbed a piece of hot magma, leapt across, and tossed it through the barrier. We climbed to the top of a tower, popped our wrench into a bolt, and fired up the first turbine.

The second turbine could only be reached after some rail grinding, one of our favorite features from Tools. The pacing of QfB's rails is influenced by the new mechanics as well. Since Ratchet can't use Clank's helicopter abilities to make big jumps, he has to use the tether to hook onto objects and swing. Shades of Bionic Commando? It's a bit along those lines. We then took Ratchet along the sides of the second tower, which was strewn with buzzsaw blades and other perils. Here also the tethering function came in handy, at we had to tug some platforms in order to leap to safety.

Although our demo with Allgeier was brief, we walked away from Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty rather satisfied. We enjoyed last fall's Tools of Destruction, and are glad to play another chapter and discover a few more answers concerning that game's cliffhanger finale. It remains to be seen if the PS3's hardcore fanbase will gravitate toward Quest's mini-adventure after Tools' initially disappointing sales run, but the series' loyalist will likely eat up the three or four hours of extra gameplay that it offers. The biggest question in our minds is if this experiment in episodic content is the real "future" referred to by the series' new suffix.